Knowing that we had a long day and many sites to see, we headed out of the KOA early in the morning.

Our first destination today was the Grand Canyon. Something really nice about the Grand Canyon is the shuttle service they offer. They want to limit the number of cars driving into the park, so they offer a shuttle service from the nearby towns. We weren’t planning on staying at the Grand Canyon for long, so we parked the truck and camper and hopped on the shuttle! We took the shuttle to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon and walked along the path. It’s absolutely ridiculous how massive the Grand Canyon is! I wish we had stayed in the area for the night so we could do the Bright Angel trail hike that takes you all the way to the canyon floor and back up. Next time! Staying on the Rim trail, you see the same site the whole time, so we headed back to the shuttle. Overall, we were at Grand Canyon for approximately an hour.

 

We headed out toward Petrified Forest National Park. Along the way, Scott really wanted to stop at the Meteor Crater site. He has these memories from his childhood of seeing the Meteor Crater and how massive it is and how they put an Astronaut down by the meteor. We bought our tickets and walked outside. I headed toward the stairs that I saw outside as I assumed we needed to go up them to see the crater. Scott said “where are you going? The crater is right here!” I guess in my mind, I wasn’t looking to see a hole in the ground. It really looked to me like someone just dug a bunch of dirt out of the ground and piled it up! Scott was disappointed that I wasn’t impressed. You couldn’t even see the meteor because it’s deep in the ground still!

 

We made our way to Petrified Forest National Park. This national park is extremely unique. There is one road through the park and it is conveniently located where you exit the highway, take the road, and end up back on the highway! The national park is named for the large deposits of petrified wood in the desert. These petrified trees date back 225 million years go. They are preserved under mud and tar and other things. Eventually, the wood petrifies and calcifies. It’s crazy to see because you can see how they used to be trees (they still look like fallen logs!) but they are filled with a rainbow!

 

Another interesting part of this national park is the amount of history there is with native tribes. We were able to see a lot of hieroglyphics. It’s interesting to think that even thousands of years ago our ancestors engaged in graffiti 🙂

Our final destination was originally going to be inside New Mexico almost to Albuquerque, however the INSANE traffic on I-40 caused us to stop early at a KOA in Grants, NM. We, again, pulled in late at night and almost immediately went to bed.